Mother Theresa, 3

"It was while she was teaching at the Loreto convent school in Calcutta that the second great break in Mother Teresa's life took place; the call within a call, as she puts it. She had occasion to go into some of the very poorest streets of Calcutta - and where are there any poorer - and suddenly realized that she belonged there, not in her Loreto convent with its pleasant garden, eager schoolgirls, congenial colleagues and rewarding work. Again the only impediment to her new vocation was the happiness and happy relationships it required her to relinquish. It might seem strange to regard any religious order as an unduly easeful existence, but that was how Mother Teresa saw it in contrast with the lives of the very poor in Calcutta. She had to wait for some two years to be released from the vows she had already taken in order to be able to go back into the world, there to take even stricter vows of her own devising. Ecclesiastical authority, I should add, is something that she accepts in the same unquestioning way that peasants accept the weather, or sailors storms at sea. It would never occur to her either to venerate or to challenge it. She just waited patiently. When at last her release came, she stepped out with a few rupees in her pocket, made her way to the poorest, wretchedest quarter of the city, found a lodging there, gathered together a few abandoned children- there were plenty to choose from - and began her ministry of love."
- Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God